In the eyes of most this will be more than likely be another blah blah more weapons blah blah no skills blah blah post but hear me out.
One of the main reasons I really enjoyed playing GW was the fact that over 2 professions you nearly had 300/400 skill combos that you could choose for your 8 slots. This was amazing, and I spent a ton of time just looking at the skills to see what fun and interesting builds I could come up with. Now I know that this many skills involves an enormous amount of balancing, and the balancing never stopped.
What I’m suggesting for gw2 is not adding so many skills like guild wars had, but atleast like 4 more variations on each skill slot. Choosing ele for an example might be a bad one since they have the 4 attunements, but take scepter fire for example, #2 dragon’s tooth, I think an arcane version that you could sub in for fire that adds confusion to the mob hit would be awesome even though it would totally go against the fire specialization, unless of course you have an arcane version for every attunement.
Now before I lose my train of thought, I’m just trying to say although 5 skills for each weapon is great and provides great balance, (here goes my train of thought sorry if I drop points and begin new ones) maybe something like the 5 per weapon is PvP only, and the new skills are PvE versions only, which would reduce the need for much balancing. Here’s another thought, each weapon has its 5 main skills that are found on its weapon currently, but could be subbed out on spots 2-5 for ‘class skills’, these could be more utility, heals, damaging, conditions, etc etc. Allowing for the player to customize how they like to play even greater, much like GW1 was where if you wanted to stack blindness on an on ele, you had 5 choices + 2 elites and you could pick from.
I have to end here, my music destroyed what ever ideas I had going.
Please expand on this idea more for whoever read down to here, I’ll come back sooner or later and I would love to see discussion on this topic, with whatever ideas you also have.
Also allowing people to move around their skills would be very nice, such as having your heal on #2, now I know this might not currently be possible. But with the slot skills for 2-5 idea I have above I believe it would work.